Tips Tuesday – Digital Downloads, Video, Member Sites, TikTok Money, Authorship

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• A sneak peak at what’s coming for you from BlogAid this month
• Where to get your holiday sales notifications
• Update on the Digital Downloads and Member Site Coalition
• Why Video and Ecomm are the future
• UpdraftPlus is still having issues and where we are with that
• Why I’m excited to be joining the new WP Performance Team
• Go items that will be in WP 5.9 in just a few weeks
• Where to get your WP update tutorial
• New author check in Google Rich Snippets
• Record riches on TikTok
• Why Google is in serious hot water with AMP

Listen to the Podcast

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Spill the Beans Livestream tonight

Do join us live tonight at 8pm ET / 5pm PT on the BlogAid Facebook Page. We spill the beans on this week’s news, breaking stories for the day too, and special info just for those who watch. And the replay is available here on this Tips Tuesday post later too. But the live party is so much more fun.

Replay

Who I Help

All BlogAid posts and tutorials are intended to assist business-minded, hands-on bloggers and webmaster designers who are serious about making money and who want to stay up-to-date with site changes. And our BB Hub is a private member site and Facebook group for my site audit clients that has lots of extra perks and support.

BlogAid Happenings

Welcome to November y’all.

Are you feeling the crunch to get all you need done before the end of year?

I certainly am, and here’s what’s coming for you:

• I’m currently writing the recipe video tutorial section for the Video SEO Booster course and that will finish it up.
• I’m currently finishing up the tests for every version of the WP Recipe Maker plugin and those results will be in the DIY SEO course.
• The first set of Interworx tutorials are written for my Webmaster Training course as more of my folks move to that control panel on VPS accounts at Iridium Hosting.
• WP 5.9 is due out in mid December and I’m already making notes for the Gutenberg Ninja course updates.
• In December I’ll start new testing for authorship and those notes will go into the DIY SEO course later next year, and more on the return of authorship in a moment.
• At the end of December I’ll be putting together our Quick Check series for the DIY SEO course where we have super short checks every day for about a week or so in January to ensure our SEO foundation stuff is up to date with Yoast and Search Console and such. 
• In December I’ll also be updating all of the DIY SEO live workshops that we start in mid January too.

There’s plenty more on my to do list, but these are the “must do” projects to complete prior to the end of the year.

Get Your Holiday Sales Notifications

And yep, we’re coming up on holiday sales time here at BlogAid.

So be sure you’re subscribed to BlogAid News so you get notification of when the deepest discounts go live.

And hint, hint – those will be sooner than you think!!!!

Site Services Update

I’m slowly allowing my open project load to decrease from quadruple down to double load through the end of the year too.

As 2 projects close, I’m opening a new one.

I just contacted or onboarded the last of the folks that I guesstimated would start in Oct. And we’ll be ready for Nov projects on time. 

All new project requests are still looking like February at this time – best guess.

Digital Downloads and Member Site Update

This past week I had a super nice conversation with the newest member of our Ecomm Coalition and we clarified the types of site owners we can serve and their needs.

And later in the week I had another conversation with the vendor who is creating digital download packets. She is deep into vetting multiple carts and doing comparisons of what each offers.

We also discussed member site stuff and which type of client is going to want a hands-on site solution and which clients are going to want hands-off, 3rd party solutions.

All of the vendors already have a super good grip on the on-site solutions, like membership plugins and such. And we are going to be tabling the 3rd party solutions checks until next year.

In the meantime, I have another group that I’ll be joining to do deeper research on what’s happening with on-site solutions, as some of the simple setup ones have changed since I last looked at them years ago.

Our goal is to offer 2 types of on-site solutions for folks just starting out with a short, simple course. And then we already know what we can do for folks who are already experienced with selling more, or who plan to go big guns with it from the start.

I’ll keep you posted on our progress.

Video and Ecomm are the future

Folks, I’m already seeing posts about what the trends and money-makers will be in 2022.

ALL of them say video, video, video, and Ecomm with your own products is the way everything is going.

Every platform you can use to get eyeballs is focusing on video and products too.

This is precisely why I’m dedicating so much time to vetting resources for you to get in on these money-making trends in a big way.

I hope you’ll come along for the journey!!

Screen Reader User 

My webmasters are looking for folks willing to share how a screen reader and such works and what the internet is like for them to use.

This will be a paid consult, so if you use, or know of folks who use screen readers, please get in touch with me through the site.

BB Hub Happenings

UpdraftPlus still having issues

I’ve been working closely with one of my clients to help troubleshoot the issues we are encountering with UpdraftPlus having a “failure to progress” error on sites that have tons of images.

So far, none of the fixes they have suggested have worked. And running so many tests has also clogged up the cron queue on some sites so that no scheduled events are running.

I made a tutorial for my BB Hub folks on how to clear their cron schedule, along with updates on what we’re trying with UDP.

I’ll keep you posted as we go.

Please do report what you’re seeing with each fix attempt in our BB Hub Facebook group.

And THIS is the power of our village at work so we can get the extra support to everyone at once and keep them from each having to jump through useless hoops and feeling like they are in this all by themselves.

And this is also the power of me doing so many site audits. I get to see issues and warn folks.

Many of my site owners didn’t even know their backups had been failing. We got those notification issues fixed too.

That’s all the happenings from around here. Let’s jump into this week’s tips.

WordPress Tips

Joining new WP Performance Team

A couple of weeks ago I reported that a proposal had been made to start a new Performance team for WP, and that if it looked like a go, I would be joining it.

Well, it looks like there is a lot of interest in it and their first meeting will be Nov 2nd.

And I’ll be there!!

I’ve spent years working with plugin and theme developers to help them create better wares for all of us.

And I’m super happy to bring that knowledge and skillset to this new team.

I’m also delighted to get the inside scoop on what they will be focusing their efforts on too.

I’ll keep you posted on what happens.

Go items for WP 5.9

The WP team has announced the elements they feel confident will make the WP 5.9 release in mid December.

Here’s the list, and as you can see, it is full of more Full Site Editing elements:

• Block themes, and their template and template part editing flows.
• The default Twenty Twenty-Two block theme.
• The Styles interface.
• A myriad of design tools: layout control, block gap, typography options, border support, spacing, dimension controls, enhanced cropping tools, and duotone filters available in many blocks.
• Navigation Block.
• Improved block interactions, such as List View drag and drop, enhanced toolbar controls when using nested blocks, enhanced inserter between blocks, and block-level locking for patterns and inner blocks.
• General UI improvements, like rich URL previews, the improved settings modal, and refined icons and animations.
• Insertion of patterns directly from the Pattern Directory.
• Performance improvements.

What’s interesting about this list is not all of the elements are actually ready to be included.

So, I expect there to be a LOT of bug scrubbing from the time they release the first beta in a couple of weeks until the final release a month later.

Get Your Update Tutorial

And because of so much Full Site Editing stuff going into the next WP release, we will not be the first folks to update.

BlogAid News subscribers will get a full tutorial on when and how to do this update when I feel it is safe for us to do it.

So, be sure you are on the list.

SEO Tips

Author check in Google Rich Snippets

I told you so!!!!

A few Tips Tuesday’s ago I mentioned seeing signs that indicated Google was interested in bringing back authorship.

And recently when I’ve run my site audit client’s posts through Google Rich Snippets, I’m seeing a warning for a missing author field.

It is listed as optional, but this is the way Google gives us a direct clue as to what they think is important for us to have on our sites.

Now, when I first started seeing the signs of this, Yoast let us know that he already has author schema in the premium version of the plugin.

Where it’s linking and what schema it has in it is the test I mentioned that I’ll be doing soon for the DIY SEO course.

I think we are going to need to go beyond whatever that schema is, though, and that’s the deeper stuff I’ll be testing.

So, I’m not saying you need the premium version of Yoast yet. Let me finish my checks first. But I am saying I think we’ll want at least one other batch of schema markup in a special place beyond that and I’m looking for an easy way for us to do that, and maybe even replicate what the Yoast premium plugin is doing too.

Monetization Tips

Record Riches on TikTok

In last week’s Tips Tuesday livestream, I mentioned how many folks I have watched launch new careers from doing TikTok, and how many folks I’m seeing make money during their livestreams.

Dustin Hyle, of ProSiteHelp shared a link to someone who set a single day record of sales on TikTok to the tune of $2 billion.

Yes – $2 billion – with a b.

With all I have going on through the end of the year, I won’t be able to start a TikTok course until at least January. I want to ensure I hit the ground running with it when I do start publishing there. So I do want to take a course.

But, I’m using this time to do my research for what I want to post and taking notes on how folks are becoming successful on the platform.

That homework is definitely paying off for me to properly vet the course I want to take, as I know what functions I’m looking to learn too.

And, it’s helping me make my editorial calendar so I can get started publishing immediately as I take the course too.

I intend for this to be a real traffic source and money maker for me and I’m doing all I can to give it my best shot.

And of course, I’ll keep you posted as I go.

Google’s in hot water with AMP

Years ago I told you AMP was a bad idea for your site.

A few of my clients decided not to listen to me and put that crap on their site anyway.

They were so sorry they did because they watched their revenue drop lower than whale poop.

And it was a nasty mess to get AMP off their sites too.

So, why did they think it was a good idea?

For the same reason everyone else who tried it did – Google said it would make your page load faster and get better rankings in search.

Well, now we have the unredacted anti-trust complaint filed against Google to prove that they lied about both of those things.

Here’s a quote from the document:

“Google went to market falsely telling publishers that adopting AMP would enhance page load times. But Google employees knew that AMP only improves the “median of performance” and AMP pages can actually load slower than other publisher speed optimization techniques.”

Here’s another quote:

“The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling. Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a “nice comparative boost.”

And all of this stemmed from Google wanting to give themselves an edge in header bidding for ad space.

You can read the rest of it for yourself.

But, the bottom line is, what’s good for Google is not always good for your site.

I do my best to help you vet this stuff, and I hope this example gives you reason to listen to me and follow my advice and not the herd mentality.

I keep you way ahead of the curve

If there is something important you need for your site, I tell you at least a year, if not two years ahead of Google making it a thing.

When folks where panicking over HTTPS, my folks already had it done 2 years prior. Not only that, they had it done for real, with no trickery, and they have 5 HTTPS security headers – 3 of which Google requires. Not only that, they have the minimum TLS level that Google requires now too.

There’s way more to it than tricking all of the links in your database to be redirected to HTTPS.

And then when folks were panicking about Core Web Vitals, all of my peeps were already set – a year prior to the deadline.

There is no plugin that is going to give you that kind of passing speed without using some trickery.

My peeps actually got their speed issues fixed – no trickery needed.

Best of all, they know how to keep their sites super fast too.

Ready for your site audit and to get into the BB Hub club so you can stay well ahead of the curve and out of panic too? 

Well, if you are a DIY, hands-on site owner, then sign up!!!

Wrap Up

That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday.

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Be sure to visit BlogAid.net for more tips and resources and I’ll see you online.